Traditional baseball bats are made of a variety of trees such as ash trees, maple trees, red oak trees, hickory trees, poplar trees, or nearly any variety of tree. Ash and maple trees are the most popular variety of trees used to make baseball bats. These trees must reach a trunk diameter of greater than 12 inches. Nearly fifty years of growth is required for an ash tree to reach a minimum size required for harvesting to manufacture baseball bats. These trees are then cut, limbed, split, and placed in a lathe. The lathe turns and shaves the splits of wood into cylinders known as billets. These billets are placed into a lathe that shapes the billets into a baseball bat complete with a knob, handle, and barrel.
This process is wasteful as nearly half the ash tree is unacceptable for making baseball bats. The limbs of the tree are completely wasted. Further, the natural seams of the ash wood, present between growth rings, weaken the bat. These seams are not taken into consideration when producing billets or bats. Even further, the billets and eventual baseball bats are made of wood of consistent density without the possibility of tuning a varying density along the length of the bat.
The present invention addresses these and other problems of traditional methods of manufacturing baseball bats.